The present invention relates to an information reproducing apparatus suitable for reproducing music data stored in a high capacity storage apparatus, a reproducing method and a storage medium which stores a software program for the method.
The present application claims priority from Japanese Application No. 2000-347014, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference for all purposes.
A new market for hard disc drives (HDD) is emerging. Consumer electronics industry and HDD industry have started to become partners and to join together in trying to introduce HDD into not only personal computers but every equipment handling digital data within a home.
In the past few years, because of large increase in capacity and price reduction of HDD, it has become possible to store substantial amount of image data and music contents.
HDD audio devices store music contents into HDD and reproduce the music contents. Data used in these HDD audio devices is compressed according to various formats, and is stored and reproduced. The current typical examples of the compression methods are: MP3 (MPEG1: Moving Picture Experts Group 1, Audio Layer III) and ATRAC3 which is improved from ATRAC (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding). Music data for about one minute is equivalent to approximately 1 megabytes.
For example, if HDD has a storage capacity of about 10 gigabytes, 2000 pieces of music can be stored assuming that a playing time of a piece of music is five minutes.
When as much as 2000 pieces of music are stored and read out for reproduction as described above, selection of a piece of music is required. However, since extremely complicated procedures are required for selecting a desired piece of music from a vast number of pieces of music, usage thereof has been very troublesome. Also, it takes much time for the selection, which is a non-negligible problem.